Samsung Galaxy Gear works with the Nexus 5, at least unofficially

The Samsung Galaxy Gear might have been met with a mixed reception at launch, but there’s no denying that underneath it’s initial issues, there’s plenty of potential. To Samsung’s credit, they are slowly but surely addressing some of the watch’s biggest problem areas by further refining the software, enhancing the watch’s notification system and improving the smartwatch app situation.

Unfortunately one issue that still holds the Galaxy Gear back is device compatibility. At launch the Galaxy Gear only worked with the Note 3, and while it now supports a few other popular Samsung devices, those without a Samsung handset are left out in the dark. The good news for Nexus 5 owners is that you can now join the exclusive “Galaxy Gear compatible” club, at least unofficially.

Thanks to the efforts of XDA member pcelli, a method for pairing the Nexus 5 with the Galaxy Gear has been detailed, and involves pulling certain files from the Gear Manager APK and manually installing them on your handset. Although the process is a bit involved, the good news is that it allows your Nexus device to work almost the same as an approved Samsung handset would. The only exception to this is that S Voice and Weather are TouchWiz-dependent features, and therefore don’t work.

The method has only been officially confirmed to work with the Nexus 5, though SamMobile was able to at least pair it with the Nexus 7. They were unable to fully test if it works with the tablet however, as it requires you to reset your Galaxy Gear to factory settings before it can fully connect to the Nexus 5 or Nexus 7. Outside the Nexus 5 and possibly Nexus 7, it’s also possible that this method may work on other smartphones and tablets, but there are no guarantees.

For more details on how to pair a Nexus handset or tablet with the Galaxy Gear you’ll want to head on over to the XDA developer’s forum. If the Galaxy Gear supported more non-Samsung handsets out-of-the-box (or even unofficially) would you consider buying the Gear or do you feel that the company’s first smartwatch attempt just doesn’t cut it for your needs?

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Samsung Galaxy Gear gets its first custom kernel

Custom development on the Galaxy Gear hasn’t been as quick as one sees on smartphones, but the community has still managed to do a lot of cool stuff with Samsung’s smartwatch, including a full custom ROM and creating plenty of cool watch faces. Now, the Gear has received its first custom kernel, thanks to the efforts of XDA Recognized Developer lilstevie, called Triangulum.

At the moment, the kernel supports few features: it apparently enables the use of both cores of the CPU and allows it to run at the maximum frequency of 1.6GHz after overclocking, which should offer increased performance (not that the Gear is slow, but you can never have too much power, whether it’s a phone or watch). There’s also init.d support, which should enable firing up various scripts at startup (like zipalinging for reduced memory usage by apps, etc.), and the watch will get rooted when the kernel is flashed.

That’s a pretty small list of features (it is, after all, a smart watch and not a full-fledged smartphone), but it’s enough to kickstart what we hope will be further development on custom kernels on the Galaxy Gear, which continues to get better and better with every update. Flashing the kernel requires the usual tools – Heimdall or Odin – and you can find more details, including the download link, at the source link.

http://goo.gl/9fMSaE

Source

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